Curriculum design and teaching styles for NVLD/DVSD kids and adults

General Discussion General NVLD Discussion
1

Like a lot of neurodivergent people, I had a rough time in school, made even worse by a chaotic home environment and nearly annual moves to a new city. School was a total waste of time for me, and I become a total autodidact, meaning if I learned anything it was because I did it myself. While this has an upside in that it makes people independent thinkers, I think for me at least it’s made learning things from other people more difficult.

There is a private school for kids with NVLD, but I’ve been thinking about what a high school through college and even grad school curriculum should include or what ways typical curricula could be modified to make them more useful to people with NVLD/DVSD. Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

2

I think the number one thing is a general awareness that visual/kinesthetic lessons and “a picture is worth a thousand words” leaves many kids behind. This is currently the received wisdom among teachers and it makes a certain amount of sense - it is probably a course correction after years over leaving students with other cognitive profiles behind. But now they are leaving us behind.

3

Hi DPM, thanks for posting.

Could you go into a bit more detail here? Interesting, but I’m not quite sure what you mean. Thanks!

4

So growing up in the 90s/00s there was a general attitude among my teachers that the best lessons were highly interactive and activity based. Rote learning, memorization, and lectures were shunned as outdated.

My concern is that verbal learning is too often seen as outdated, as in like something out of the 1950s (think of a teacher giving an engaging lecture to a class), and this concerns me because NVLD people tend to do best with verbal information. I’ve also spoken to teacher friends of mine today and they tell me they’re encouraged to create visual & kinesthetic lessons. The assumption that all kids learn best this way is incorrect because, well, often we don’t. This is the why we need to debunk the old idiom, “a picture is worth a thousand words”. Often we find diagrams and interactive lessons more confusing then simple verbal instruction.

Just like teachers had to be taught that indeed some kids really are lefthanded I believe they must also be taught that indeed some kids really do learn best with verbal instruction.

5

What this argues for is flexible teaching styles and definitely for smaller class sizes that allow for individualized approaches to learning. I agree with you that any “one size fits all” approach is bound to fail a lot of learners.

6

The community college psychometrician who determined that I had NVLD determined that I was a visual learner, my father always thought I was an auditory learner and I had already determined that the “learning styles” model was probably made up, or inadequate for some students.

7

Yes I totally agree. In particular I also want to fight against the stigmatization of things we’re often good at, like rote learning and memorization. A lot of rote learning has fallen out of fashion. I’m talking about assignments like memorizing poems in a literature class or memorizing dates in a history class.

8

Someone I spoke to in an NVLD group said exactly that just earlier today.

9

This is all very interesting, but I’m wondering what curricula for people with NVLD should look like, beyond maybe a bit of rote learning isn’t going to hurt anybody. What should you have received in your education that you didn’t?

10

I’d like educators to consider that several recent trends may be hurting us. This is a hypothesis based on my time in school.
Rote learning is deemphasized or stigmatized when moving towards a “teach kids to think” model of education, which is seen as progressive. Another contributing factor is all the emphasis on other learning disabilities like ADHD. To keep ADHD kids engaged teachers move towards more interactive, visual, and kinesthetic lesson plans.
So my point is subtle. I’m not looking for massive changes. My general sense is that many of the tasks we’re good it are being deemphasized. So many times in school there’d be some complicated, interactive activity and I’d think to myself, “why can’t they just explain this to me in plain English?”
I just want educators to consider this possibility.

11

What are the tasks that you find you’re good at, school-wise? How are they deemphasized?

12

Great question!

Looking back I would have appreciated more verbal/rote/auditory activities in school. The sense I got from my teachers (this was the late 90s) was that such learning was slowly being replaced, where possible, with more modern, interactive and visual lessons. We were supposed to be grateful. My experience was that often what my teachers thought of as “progress” actually preyed on my deficits. Hopefully the 4 examples below help illustrate how I felt growing up in that environment.

1. Computerized Activities (are they really progress?)
These were all the rage. Like a lot of NVLD people I have terrible handwriting and thus I’m very grateful to have grown up with computers. Growing up I found, however, that computer-assisted learning often meant more visual information and visual reasoning. I was particularly upset in 8th grade science when they used a computer program to teach us physics of motion. I remember that the program animated rocket launches and then presented us with questions to answer. I did terribly.

The irony was that the end of the unit exam was a paper and pencil test full of word problems. I got an A. The teacher actually scolded me, thinking I must not have been applying myself on the previous, computer-assisted activities.

But in light of NVLD it makes perfect sense that word problems were easier for me. “A rocket is launched at 300mph” is easier for me to understand than an animation of the same scenario, where I have to decipher what I’m looking at.

The most frustrating part of this experience for me was my teacher constantly telling our class how advanced the computer-assisted curriculum was and how lucky we all were to have it. The word gaslighting has become very popular recently and it accurately describes how I felt. The computer program may have helped other kids but it sure didn’t help me and no way was I going to be grateful for it. Assuming all kids would benefit is a great example of an interactive/visual bias in teaching and the fallacy of a picture being “worth a thousand words” - it doesn’t apply to us.

2. Learning through Song and Verbal Repetition
In kindergarten they taught us the alphabet and the months of the year through song. This was great for me as someone with excellent auditory/verbal memory (like a lot of NVLD-people). I still remember those songs. A few years later it was time to memorize math facts, which was done primarily through written tests, and so at first I struggled to learn the multiplication tables. At home my parents quizzed me verbally, which is how I eventually learned them.

Interesting story: much later in High School I watched an old French movie with a scene in which elementary school kids learn the multiplication tables through a song-like, teacher-lead full class repetition. I was livid when I saw that. Why wasn’t I allowed to learn that way? It would have made things so much easier.

It is, after all, so simple and efficient to lead a classroom in a daily recitation of important facts. My guess is that this sort of thing has fallen out of favor because it seems “old-fashioned” and no longer appropriate except for really young kids. But why? Why can’t there be more of this?

3. Memorizing Poems in Literature Class
I was also gaslit on this in 10th grade when the teacher literally told us it was a bit of an antiquated activity and she was only assigning it as a throwback to an earlier time. The message was that a modern poetry class should spend more time analyzing and interpreting poems and not waste time memorizing. Of course I did very well owing to my verbal/auditory memory. Again it left me angry and wondering why these sorts of activities had fallen out of fashion? Why was I only good as “outdated” activities?

4. Memorizing Dates/Facts in History Class
Same as above. Teachers told us that just memorizing things was not appropriate for learning - better to learn concepts and do activities like looking at historical artifacts. They told us we’d remember things better this way. Deciphering historical artifacts is, mind you, a highly visual activity. Again I felt gaslit because I knew I was good at memorization but was being told I was wrong, that my desires were outdated, and that the teachers knew best. The irony here is that NVLD people are thought to need things to be verbally coded. A little memorization of dates and facts would have helped me place everything I was learning.

13

Very interesting. I’m a part-time musician now, and reading what you’ve said here, I wonder if “coding” rote learning into music might have worked well for me.

Anybody know anything about the curriculum of the NVLD Project-supported elementary school in NYC?

14

You might find some info along those lines on the Winston Prep website, here:

That said, I don’t think it is practical for all NVLD people to receive diagnosis and intervention. Many of us blend in so well, especially milder cases. This is why I think it is so important for teachers not to exclude pedagogies that work for us from their classrooms. The crux of my hypothesis, as per my own experiences above, is that what is thought of as up-to-date pedagogically may often work against us. I could be wrong but I’d really like to get some professionals in the field to look into this.

15

Sorry for being dense, but I still don’t understand your objection to assessment and tailor made curricula for kids or adults with NVLD. If a kid is so high functioning that they blend in and can deal with a garden variety crappy one size fits all public school classroom…good on them, there’s nothing stopping their parents from sending them to public school. For me, Kindergarten through high school was a total waste of time, and just served to make me traumatized, derealized, and depressed. Didn’t learn a thing except what I learned on my own or from volunteering in zoos and museums. It would have been great for me to be in a school like this (which we could never have been able to afford and it would have been impossible even if my parents had given a shit) and I know that my life would have been vastly different if I had been able to attend such a place.

16

You make a very good point. Let me flesh out my thoughts on this.

I don’t object to assessment and intervention at all. We should absolutely support this. Lots of kids will benefit from alternatives to the mainstream school track and/or supplemental interventions. That said, we can also work on making the mainstream track less hellish for NVLD kids. I don’t think the two goals are mutually exclusive.

There are a few reasons why I think “making the mainstream track less hellish” is important. One is to make life easier for kids prior to diagnosis. Diagnosing NVLD is a bit of a headache (the test takes several hours), which means many kids aren’t diagnosed until after their failures have added up and a neuropsych evaluation is recommended. Many have already suffered through many years of schooling. Another is that even once diagnosis occurs many kids will still continue on the mainstream track. Factors like wanting to appear normal or maintain an already established friend group often make it difficult for kids and parents to pull the trigger on a major educational change. NVLD performance is so variable that it is often possible for kids to ride the mainstream track rollercoaster to the end. I think it’s worth helping those kids come out less traumatized.

Realizing this goal means we can’t let teachers off the hook. Right now many are ignorant of NVLD, but once they become more aware I don’t want them thinking they can completely ignore our needs because we’ll be getting outside interventions. As per above it’s likely many of us will still be mixed into their classes and even if we are getting outside interventions remember there is no cure for NVLD so the interventions aren’t always on point. Plus afterschool interventions like tutoring are really quite energy-sapping after a long day of school.

Similarly, I’m concerned that the medical model of diagnosis-intervention may let educators off too easy. Sending NVLD-diagnosed kids to weekly sessions with specialists or therapists does not absolve educators of their responsibility to welcome all students into their classrooms. I support DSM-inclusion but I’m also aware that the DSM is published by psychiatrists who are medical doctors, many of whom are very much oriented towards a medical model. Much of the public also thinks this way. There is, of course, no cure or pill for NVLD. We don’t want parents thinking that driving their kid for weekly “treatments” solves the problem. It really “takes a village” as they say and I suspect we won’t make progress unless educators running mainstream schools are part of the village.

So, I think we can actually work simultaneously on multiple fronts.